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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

My dream is that between these and electric bikes, we get critical mass for real, separated bike lanes on all major roads in most US cities. Taking away a lane of cars and replacing it with one for bikes/scooters vastly improves the quality of life for both drivers and cyclists, if you can get high-enough utilization. The cyclists will be safer, and there will be less traffic in the remaining lanes because fewer commuters will be in cars.

I commute 9 miles one way into SF by electric bike, and while I love my commute my quality of life would be so much higher if I didn't have to worry about merging with car traffic at several points on the route, or (much worse) cars randomly swerving out of traffic into the bike lane and stopping right in front of me to drop off a passenger or whatever.

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Couldn't agree more.

On repeated visits to NY, frustrated by the inefficiency of getting from A to B, one of my repeating dreams is the idea of closing every other street (both N-S and E-W) in the grid system to cars, and only allowing bikes, scooters, skateboards, and maybe buses. (Delivery traffic strictly outside daytime hours).

Imagine the transport utopia that would gradually develop, as more any more people not only feel safe to ride bikes, but realised that it represented the most efficient solution.

That sounds a little like the Barcelona superblock model, which I like. Less transit oriented and more "creating spaces for people to stay/live/eat/etc" oriented though.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/the-barcelona-...

Wow that is a fantastic idea that I would love to come to the States. Walking around in the city I always felt like this [0]. I have been really pushing for a car-free downtown on Sundays, its amazing how "human" you feel when you can walk around and interact without the drone and smell of traffic being a constant presence.

[0]:http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2014/12/roads.jpg....

I live in Barcelona and while I personally love the Superilles, many of the locals who live near/in them hate them. They all say it's a huge inconvenience. That said, as a Canadian coming from one of the most car-centric cities in Canada (Calgary), anything that focuses on not driving is refreshingly wonderful.

I think if streets were limited to delivery traffic and construction you would be fine. Note that this needs to be real deliveries. Sort of like pornography I know it when I see it, but I'm not sure I can define it well enough for a law to work.

You could ban delivery vehicles over a certain size so that only small autonomous delivery bot could do the last 100 yards between the main drop off spot and the delivery van/truck.

Time to disrupt the notion of 'delivery': Sign up to drop off a package or two and get access to the internal city streets for x hours. What could go wrong?

That is why it is hard. Delivery needs to have a definition that doesn't allow that. Probably it needs to be so strict that a delivery driver cannot even buy a soda at the store they are delivering to.

You could define it by volume or weight of package.

Package-carrying bikes can take a surprising amount. https://www.carvelo.ch/de/private/modelle/data/51.php

Anything that can be carried by a bicycle courier, must be. Anything else, <6am or >9pm (for example).

In Groningen, NL deliveries to inner city shops and restaurants is limited to timeslots ( something like up to 11h00 ).

I like this but I think we could go further in that we probably don't need 4 lanes for bikes and scooters. It would be super awesome to turn these center lanes into a space for food trucks or farmers markets, etc. It would be interesting to have just two lanes in each direction like this that formed a square or rectangle and see what happens.

Absolutely right - imagine the streets with walkways, gardens, kiosks, playgrounds, etc. The NY Highline concept could spread throughout the city.

this is happenning. more and more streets in Manhattan are being closed to traffic and they become just walking places. For an example, look at a good chunk of Broadway around Time Square. If I remember correctly, some urban planner told Mayor Bloomberg about the Copenhagen model, and he liked it, and we embarked in a multi-decade plan to move in that direction.

Reducing car traffic and increasing pedestrian walking areas in NYC is very good. However, bike lanes are not a real answer. NYC needs better subway systems... more lines and more on time.

If I recall correctly some residential parts of Seattle have a system like this. They don't outright disallow cars, but every other street is full of sufficient traffic calming measures that make it highly undesirable to drive down.

Portland, OR has a number of these "bike boulevards". They make a huge difference. It's not every other street. But given a car-heavy street that is a major path from A to B, a parallel one block away is designated. Cars are still allowed to use them, of course, but not exactly encouraged.

Frequent speed bumps are laid down, and (just like for its partner car-centric road) all cross intersections have stop signs leading _into_ the boulevard. They're generally in good surface shape. You can roll right along at full speed, mostly just watching for pedestrians (the lack of cars also makes them pleasant for walking).

Not really possible without a mostly-grid road system, of course, but where it is, it's awesome.

I recently purchased an electric bike to commute to work, and I ended up returning it. Electric bikes go very fast, which means that cars often have difficulty passing, and drivers are not quite sure how to treat you. I ended up returning the bike because I didn't want to end up as a splatter on the side of the road. If the US had protected bike lanes, it might have worked out differently.

Yep, that's a frustrating reality -- I've had my share of close calls too. Out in the suburbs there's usually a shoulder/bike lane that's wide enough for safe passing, but on city streets that are too narrow to fit a bike and a car side by side I ride right in the center of the lane. That's the only way I've found to prevent distracted drivers from zooming past with only inches to spare.

You could just go slower... Get a pedal assist version and turn the assist down.

Or go faster and get an electric motorbike or Vespa and ride in the middle of the lane with traffic.

That was my experience as well, both in Bay Area and in Bavaria (though it's not as dangerous here). I realized that I'm guaranteed to have a serious or deadly accident over just a decade of commuting. In a car you have 2 more layers of protection - the mass of the car and safety systems.

This exists in most major cities in China and it’s absolutely brilliant. Such a quality of life improvement.

The Netherlands is quite interesting in that separate bike lanes are already a thing in most cities, which means that the step to applying those to inter-city roads with the advent of electric bicycles is a relatively small one, so there's a lot of movement in that direction now. At certain locations electric bicycles are already a far more common sight among commuters, and it'll be interesting to see how that growth continues in the next few years.

Aren't intersections the most dangerous spot for bikes/scooters, though? (car makes right-hand turn into bike going straight)

[Random pet peeve: when a clearly-marked bike lane ends and combines into car lane, and still, bicyclists insist on filtering up the side of the curb up to the stop line. Please, don't)

The first thing you said is the reason cyclists do the second.

The biggest risk is a car turning into you at the junction because you were in a blind spot. It's much safer to be at the front of the queue so you are clearly visible, and can clear the danger zone ahead of the traffic.

Also, in general, things you see cyclists doing that you perceive as dangerous very rarely are - almost every serious bike car crash is because the driver didn't see the cyclist and turned into them. The cyclist behaving most dangerously is timidly hugging the curb trying to stay out of your way!

When no dedicated bike lane is provided, cyclists are governed by the same rules as motorcyclists. That means that they can (and should) take up the full lane just as a car would, but actually doing that tends to evoke negative responses from car drivers. In jurisdictions that allow it, lane splitting is both faster and less likely to trigger road rage, though probably more dangerous.

At least in SF, they protect the bike lanes sometimes - no right on red, at least, when there's a protected bike lane.

Re filtering, is that technically against the rules? It's a single lane at that point, but in CA it's legal to share the lane if there's room. Seems like a cyclist or motorbike has the right to lanesplit and move up.

> Seems like a cyclist or motorbike has the right to lanesplit and move up.

Yes, but in this case you filter on the driver's left. You don't filter up in the 10cm between the curb and the car when the driver is signaling right; it's a dick move and eventually you're going to get hurt.

http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/

Fair enough, but honestly this seems like far less of a problem than the large fraction of drivers who don't know how to turn properly in the first place, and just make that right turn without having merged into the bike lane.

I commuted in SF for a year, and I'd guess 75% of cars don't know why the bike lane starts getting dashed before an intersection.

Protected intersections are also a good idea, yes.

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